Start my own business

after eight months of planning, preparing and working my ass off my online magazine is finally live. Hurrah! My business partner won’t let me put a link to it here as he thinks it’s mixing my personal and professional life, but needless to say I am overjoyed to finally ‘have a business’ rather than be ‘starting a business’. I cannot recommend it enough!

Now’s the time when all the planning and preparation starts to seem worthwhile. Instead of the theoretical exercise of ‘starting a business’ we actually now have to thing practically about implementing our official launch with all the PR, marketing and merchandising that involves, not to mention collating the last six months of research into making our business viable and (fingers crossed) profitable. Having (as I said) just spent six months planning this start-up. My main advice would be it inevitably will take longer than you think, no matter how realistic you think you are with your business plan.

to be when we soft launch, but delays are inevitable it seems and once again our hopes have been dashed. Still, looking on the bright side there’s now more time to write editorial features.

I am so excited I could wee myself!

from ‘go live’. It’s exciting and even though it has taken us so much longer than we anticpated, it almost seems like it has snuck up on us. There’s still a lot to do…

We need to get business stationary printed, implement our PR strategy, as well as work on search engine optimisation, not to mention registering with the tax man and sorting out an accountancy system. Plus, once we are live we are waiting a few weeks to have an official launch – to give us time to iron out a few creases which are undoubtedly going to show up once members of the public start using it.

Still, we’re closer to our fortunes every day…

my self-imposed deadline. But they’re there to be broken I guess. Still things are going according to plan, just slower than we would have ever expected.

While we are still over-protectively secretive about the business, we’re at the stage where we have begun revealing the general gist to a few people… one can never be too careful about ideas being stolen, especially in a very competitive industry, but it’s good to get feedback and opinion to some extent. It’s a hard balance to strike, but luckily we are so close now that even if one of our competitors did get wind of our launch, it would be too late for them to react before our (delayed) launch.

One thing we have had to do, which wasn’t planned, is start to apply for part-time jobs. It’s a necessity which we would (obviously) prefer not to do, but money we need the money pure and simple. Hopefully we won’t have to keep up the part-time jobs for too long, just until the business starts making a proper turn-over.

Every day we’re getting closer… and that’s the main thing.

nine day deadline is looming and while I have in some ways been self-emplyed i.e. not earning a penny for six months my business is not officially launched, so I have nine days to tick it off. Drum roll please…

I would prefer to avoid it altogether – especially when dealing with utter morons, but still it’s all a learning curve I guess. I wish I had been more assertive with my web designer to start with, so that now he didn’t think he could the piss so blatantly out of us… GRRR nervous breakdown is just around the corner – and only 12 days to launch. Oh dear.

until the planned official launch date. It’s a bit hopeful, but if there’s one thing I’ve learnt while setting-u this business, it’s that you have to set yourself deadlines. So April 9 it is. There is a LOT of work to do before then though.

I think launching a business is much like going travelling – instead of packing half of what you think you need and taking twice as much money, launching a business you need twice as much time and money as you need. Still, despite having made slow progress and taking six months to plan and prepare we are almost there and are planning on launching our venture around the start of April – until the next disaster comes along…